The Advantages of a Hybrid Lifestyle: How to Find Balance in Your Life

A hybrid lifestyle can maximize dual sides of our personalities or obligations, helping us find work/life balance and discover a fun and healthy lifestyle.

It’s a perfect day. You wake up and reluctantly leave your hybrid mattress, which is made of springs and foam. For breakfast, it’s the ultimate combination of fowl and cow, an omelet made of eggs and cheese. Driving to work in your Prius, which is fueled by gas and electricity, you listen to “Dirt Road Anthem”by Jason Aldean, a song that mixes country and hip-hop. At the office, Steve is wearing a sweater vest and, despite some ribbing from the guys, Jim in accounting is still sporting that calculator watch. Hybrids are everywhere. They make life better. More importantly, we can learn how to live a better life via hybrid products.

Often, we allow this blending and balancing to occur in our products, but not in our lives. A hybrid lifestyle can maximize dual sides of our personalities or obligations, helping us find work/life balance and discover a fun and healthy lifestyle.

Adapt Hybrid to the Rest of Your Life

If we agree that by combining two good products we can create something great, why not consider that approach with your lifestyle? A lot of us have crazy schedules these days. You’ve likely felt exhausted, drained, or distracted, given the demands put on your time. The fact is that we spend time on activities without even realizing how disproportionate our time allotments are. For example, if you have a job that requires lots of travel, you need to know how many nights you’re spending out of town each month. If you have a flexible work situation, you need to track how many hours you spend in the office versus how many hours you’re spending at home.

Measurement is the key to knowing where our time goes. It’s easy to lose track of what’s actually happening, because what you think is going on differs from reality. Your pursuit of a hybrid, balanced life needs to be intentional. Several times, my wife has commented that I’ve been traveling a lot. My perception was that I wasn’t traveling all that much – but when we counted up the days on the calendar, she was right: I’d spent 80% of the month elsewhere.

I’ve asked people, in training sessions, to list the most important things in their lives. As you might expect, people listed family, faith, charity, hobbies, and work. Then, I asked them to rank these items in order of how they actually spent their time. They were very surprised to learn that what they said and what they did were two entirely different things. A hybrid life puts the most important things first – if you do it right.

If someone gave you an extra $50,000, what would you spend it on? If you were told you had 6 months to live, what would you spend that time doing? These questions are other good “gut checks”; where you spend your money and time is a good indication as to what you think is important. Life is too short for us to be throwing our time away on that which is inconsequential, but that’s what many people do every single day. We need to find ways to incorporate every facet of our interests and priorities in our lives so we don’t just succeed, we also enjoy. When else are we going to do it?

Stop Making Excuses

Balance is critical to happiness, and too much of anything can be a bad thing. It’s easy to get so caught up in achieving a goal (making a million dollars, getting the corner office, inventing The Next Big Product or Service) that other things fall off in your journey. It could be sad if, when you get to the end of the game, you realize you sacrificed way more than you wanted to.

Instead, if you adjust yourself along the way and stay committed to a hybrid lifestyle, the success you enjoy will have more meaning. You won’t experience elation because you’ve succeeded in one area of your life – you’ll be buzzing from the fact that you have achieved something in each area of life that’s important to you.

Ask yourself, “Is this important to me?” If you truly want a hybrid life, you have to ask, “Is this important enough?” Where are you trying to go, and what are you willing to sacrifice to get there? More importantly, what do you want to still have waiting for you when you get to the other side? Don’t be that loser who justifies bad decisions by saying things like, “I don’t have time for that” or “The time I spend with my kids, although short, is quality.” That’s bull! The fact of the matter is that we make time for what matters, and if you are not choosing what’s important now, you’re going to pay for it later, one way or another.

If it’s time to make a change and find your hybrid life, do it. Don’t wait. We all make choices, and choosing a hybrid lifestyle is something that will give you a balanced, fulfilling life.

Steven Hawkings, author of A Brief History of Time, compared the probability of life evolving to a horde of monkeys producing one of Shakespeare’s sonnets by randomly pecking on typewriter keys. The likelihood of that happening would be minuscule. Even the odds of simply spelling out the poet’s name would be scant.